Second, third, and fourth grades

In September 1956 I started the second grade at Adrian grade school. Mrs. Morgan was our teacher. She had a reputation of being a mean teacher, whether or not she really was, and was not one of our favorites. When I started the second grade my little mind boggled at the thought that we would be learning to add entire columns of numbers and to add and subtract three- and four-digit numbers.

Near the end of my second grade year, sometime in the spring of 1957, our class took a big field trip. We rode in school busses from Adrian to Nyssa, then got on the train there to ride to Boise, the capital of Idaho and the biggest city in the entire area. We visited the state capitol building and the state historical museum, where a stuffed two-headed calf was on display, and the Julia Davis Park. It was an ex­citing, fun day for a bunch of seven- and eight-year-olds.

In September 1957 I started the third grade. I remember little about that school year except I enjoyed it more than the second grade. Our teacher was a Miss Weir, who sometime during the school year got married and changed her name.

The following fall, September 1958, I started the fourth grade. Sometime during the year we studied music, and I started to play a flutaphone, a little plastic instru­ment something like a recor­der. This experience gave me an invaluable founda­tion in how to read music when, several years later, I started to take piano lessons.

We also studied Oregon history that year, which may have started my life-long love affair with history and geography and travel. To my know­ledge, I had never been any father west in Oregon than Malheur County, but I thrilled to read of those early pioneers who more than a century earlier had settled the Willamette Valley and kept the Oregon country from going British, and I loved to learn about the Lewis and Clark expe­di­tion and their bold trek across an uncharted continent to the Pacific.

Nearing the end of my fourth-grade year, at the end of February 1959, our family moved from Oregon to Idaho. That year, 1959, was the centennial of Oregon's becoming a state.